My Time As a Games “Journalist”

Corruption in gaming isn’t about freelancers fraternizing with indies, it’s about the economics and psychology of covering big-budget entertainment.

So, there’s a big social media campaign called #gamergate that’s been burning up the Twitters for a couple of weeks. Depending on who you listen to, it’s either a barrage of 4chan-powered misogyny meant to destroy the lives of outspoken women in the gaming industry, or a grass-roots campaign to wipe out corruption and payola in the gaming press.

I’m unequivocally on the “misogynistic harassment campaign” side, mostly because its organizers were stupid enough to leak weeks worth of IRC logs documenting their own planning and management of the campaign. Spoiler: they didn’t care about journalistic ethics, they just wanted to destroy a particular developer because they hated her. That said, I know people who’ve been swept up in the campaign and who do feel passionately about quality games journalism. People who hear about claims of secret cabals of indie devs and Patreon Payola and say, “Man, that is terrible!”

Let me tell you, I understand.

Back in the 90s, I wrote for a few computer entertainment and gaming magazines. One was print, others were “E-Zines.” That’s what we called them before web sites. Email distribution for the cheap ones, CD-ROM distribution for the classy ones. Heck, one was distributed as a collection of image files. That’s what we did in the days before PDFs, my friends: I’m pretty sure just saying that sent a chill up Karen McGrane’s spine. Pay was predictably grim: $0 for reviews, $25 for columns, $100 for features. Way below minimum wage, but luxurious for niche freelancing. It was fun; I did pre-release coverage of the original Fallout, Bungie’s Marathon, and cool indie games like TacOps. Man, I loved TacOps.

Anyways. Working with big publishers was rough: access to anything beyond press releases was basically dependent on favorable coverage, cleared before publication by their marketing teams. Once, I got into trouble for including an alpha screenshot in an “advance coverage” article, even though it was a glowing article and the shot was taken from a build they’d sent me. They hadn’t cleared the image, and their PR team was annoyed, and the editor had to apologize. I got off with a warning, and stories about their subsequent games just transparently went to other writers — writers who hadn’t irritated the marketing team.

Working with indies, on the other hand, was usually a blast. They were happy for coverage and they loved what they did. They were usually fans first, and they had to be passionate because they were usually teams of one, two, three people building stuff with a shoestring budget and a pile of dreams. Frankly, the power disparity working with them was inverted: they needed us, not the other way around. Indie devs didn’t “withdraw access” when someone panned their games; they were just happy someone was talking about their baby.

I kept in touch with some of those devs, even became friends, and often did short pieces on later projects they launched. I believe that’s a good thing: those kinds of long-term relationships with creators served as an alternative to consuming pre-packaged information from marketing teams. Even then, the big picture of big-publisher gaming could be exhaustingly dull. Endless reskinnings of Wolf3D and DOOM, endless discussions over incremental bumps in framerates and texture resolution. Developers and indie games that brought new ideas or angles to the table were exciting and interesting and I wanted to write about them just to break the rhythm! Even today, even poorly implemented, that stuff feels like it matters more than a new set of maps and assets and multiplayer modes for whatever AAA title is currently in heavy rotation.

Mind you, this was before the web gutted the niche publishing world. Looking back, it was a crazy time: We had subscribers! Paying us to write! Every month! Today, it’s all web and all ads. Generic Google AdWords doesn’t generate enough money to keep the server running, so you have to have highly-targeted ads aimed at the niche-iest audience you can. Which means, essentially, that a successful site covering gaming is basically funded by the companies whose products it covers. This plays out in predictable ways.

So today, with people talking about corruption and journalistic ethics, I think, yeah, I can see that. It’s a complicated problem, given the way funding in the publishing industry has gone, but it’s worth talking about. But then — then — I see people focusing 100% of their anger on a handful of indie devs and freelancers. I see people playing “follow the money” with $5 Patreon tips and $10 Kickstarter pledges like that paranoid apartment scene from A Beautiful Mind. And I think, man. Either you simply have no idea what you’re talking about, or you’re angry about something else entirely. It could be either.

What I do know is that the debate was started by people whose primary goal was smashing one indie dev. Accusing her of ethical lapses, based entirely on an angry rant by her ex-boyfriend, was just a convenient tactic. The “bigger issue” of “industry corruption” only emerged when other indie devs and freelancers stood up to defend her.

If you care about independent coverage of games, coverage not beholden to the moneyed interests of publishers, this is just a shitty approach from top to bottom. It’s like joining Scientology because you think electroshock therapy is barbaric. Your concerns are not their concerns: you’re a PR meat shield, one lone unit in a zerg rush.

Don’t be that. Don’t be their shield.